Damned stats

Last week one of those polls about public perceptions showed that we in Britain exaggerate the number of Muslims in the country by a factor of four. And we're wrong about the number of immigrants and unemployed as well. We are all, apparently, pig-ignorant and there is no hope in us.

Happily, however, this week the government has announced that we're all going to be sent a statement of what they've been buying with our income tax and national insurance tax. So we won't be quite as ignorant about one thing at least.

It feels to me that this should be a cause for mild celebration, but Frances O'Grady, general secretary of the TUC, disagrees. She thinks it's all propaganda. 'The chancellor is relying on the fact that many people think spending called welfare all goes to the unemployed,' she says. 'This is softening us up to a major cut to the welfare state safety net to which we all should contribute so that it is there if we need it.'

Obviously it's propaganda - it is, after all, information issued by the government - but I fear that the left is self-aggrandising if it thinks that this is a first shot in a post-election attack on the welfare state. That may be an added bonus; it's certainly not the primary target. Everything now is about the election, not about what happens after.

So the real issue is not the benefits section at the top of the list, but the overseas aid and EU contributions at the bottom. These latter are the two smallest items of public expenditure apparently. Which makes a nonsense of claims that that's where some real savings could be achieved. In other words, the whole exercise is aimed at UKIP, whose economic policy - such as it is - is based on cutting these two areas.

Which is not to deny that after the election the benefits bill be attacked. Of course it will be. No matter what government is elected, benefits are going to be cut.

But to return to the principle of the thing. The left is making another silly mistake if it simply attacks this idea as propaganda. Allowing people to know how their money is being spent is a perfectly reasonable exercise in democracy. If a Labour government had had the intelligence to come up with the initiative, maybe they could have determined the categories and weighted the presentation in their favour. They didn't, and it's bugger all use bleating about the Tories skewing the stats. That's what governments do; it's what Labour should have done.

Rather than complain, Labour should offer its own proposals about educating us. Maybe about the numbers of immigrants and unemployed or something. It's not a bad thing to have some information.

(Incidentally, I did rather like Clive Bull on LBC explaining to his listeners what a pie chart is. It looks like a doughnut, apparently.)

How Cameron could neuter UKIP and win the general election

Obviously the fact that Britain has decided it's time to go out bombing again is the bigger news story, but the defection of Mark Reckless to UKIP is still a major problem for David Cameron. It's really not a good look when your own MPs decide to abandon you, particularly on the eve of your conference.

On the other hand, it being the eve of conference means that Cameron has the opportunity next week to make a grand statement against UKIP in an attempt to stop the rot (in all senses).

But there's no point in imagining that dog-whistles on immigration and multiculturalism will be sufficient. That's territory that UKIP are always going to claim as their own. Instead, the real weak link in UKIP's armour is, oddly enough, Europe itself. Most people don't care much about the issue, but some do, they care very much indeed and - from a Conservative perspective - they're a worryingly significant minority. Cameron's offer of a referendum gained him a little time, but by now the UKIP response has clawed back some of the initiative; you can't trust his promises, goes the argument, look at the betrayal over the Lisbon Treaty.

So Cameron should take the opportunity at conference to do the one thing that only he, and not Nigel Farage, can do: announce the exact date on which the referendum will be held.

He's already said that it'll be before the end of 2017, but that's still too vague. There is a round of local elections due on Thursday 4 May 2017. That'd be a good date to choose.

Announce now that, in the event of a Tory, or Tory-led, government, an In/Out referendum will be held on that specific date, and suddenly the airy promise becomes concrete reality. He'd seize the initiative entirely. Every front-page would have a graphic of a calendar showing 4 May 2017. Eurosceptic commentators and Tory backbenchers would be delighted; Europhiles would reluctantly have to accept the concept of democracy.

It would leave Cameron no wriggle-room, of course, but the reality is that he can't afford the luxury of wriggle-room anymore; the UKIP threat is too great. He needs to squash comprehensively the impression that somehow he'll twist and turn and renege on his promise.

For those Tory voters tempted to desert because of Europe, there would no longer be any incentive to their votes elsewhere. Farage isn't, and never will be, able to match such a pledge. As long as it's credible, it would trump any card UKIP can possibly play. Which would leave UKIP to carry on making inroads into the Labour vote, where its appeal isn't rooted in the European issue in the first place.

Obviously there will still be disgruntled Tories, but their real bone of contention is with having a pro-European leader in the first place. And if they want to change that, they need to mount a more efficient challenge. Which they would undoubtedly lose, because there is no plausible Eurosceptic alternative to Cameron, and they've already tried - with Iain Duncan Smith - having an implausible one. Much good that did them.

I'm also fairly certain that in such a referendum, Britain would vote to remain in the EU. And since that's the result the EU would want, it will swiftly get over its cries of outrage and start working to ensure that some concessions - however cosmetic - are made in order to strengthen Cameron's hand.

In the (unlikely) event that Cameron does not emerge from the general election as prime minister, the referendum presumably wouldn't happen. And that in itself would be a nice legacy for Cameron's successor. S/he can still make a big deal of 4 May 2017, using it as a rallying-point against Ed Miliband's by-then beleaguered government. The Day That Democracy Forgot would make a nice slogan.

It'd be a big step for Cameron, who isn't a notably adventurous politician. But things are getting tight and it's time for a bold move. Played right - with sufficient statesmanlike gravitas - it could be decisive. It would lose him no support whatsoever and would bring sufficient numbers of disaffected Tory votes back into the fold to ensure victory in the general election.

The embers next time

A final (maybe) word on UKIP and the fallout from the European elections...

The Daily Telegraph reports a poll suggesting '86 per cent of people who voted for Nigel Farage’s party will do so again next year'. I'm not sure this is a particularly valid reading of the poll (commissioned, incidentally, by UKIP's financial backer Paul Sykes). What the poll results actually show is that 37 per cent will 'certainly' vote UKIP at the next general election, and 49 per cent said they were 'likely' so to do. I think we can assume that a fair chunk of that second group shouldn't be taken for granted.

But let's start by taking the Telegraph interpretation at face value. That would give UKIP the votes of 3.76 million people at a general election. A very impressive result, four times as large as the vote they got in 2010. And if the Lib Dem support collapses from the 6.8 million achieved last time, it might be enough to put UKIP in third place in the popular vote - though almost certainly not in number of seats.

On the basis of this poll, there are Conservative MPs and some rightwing commentators (such as Simon Heffer) suggesting that the Conservatives need to make some kind of electoral pact with UKIP.

This would be a mistake for UKIP. The point of a third party in the British electoral system is to provide a repository for protest votes from across the political and class spectrum. As soon as such a party does a deal with one of the two major parties, it removes a large chunk of that support. That's the problem the Lib Dems are now suffering from. All those who cast a vote for the Lib Dems from the left now feel like they were betrayed. That would have been mirrored - to a slightly smaller extent - on the right if the party had gone into coalition with Labour. Why would UKIP want to drive away those voters who want nothing to do with the Tories?

And for the Tories? A governing party doing a deal with a party that has no MPs hardly looks like a statement of strength. Heffer argues that a precedent exists with the relationship between the Conservatives and the National Liberals in 1951, but it's not very convincing. Apart from it all being a long time ago, in a different political world, the Tories were then in opposition, and the National Liberals had sixteen MPs to bring to the feast. Oh, and the Conservative Party was led by Winston Churchill - the electorate didn't believe for a second that he was a dog that any tail would wag. To put it mildly, David Cameron is not as convincing a leader.

Some sort of electoral deal between the Tories and the Lib Dems is possible, but not between the Tories and UKIP. Which, despite all their denials, leaves the latter as a passing protest.

In the excited heat of the moment, comparisons are being made in some quarters between UKIP and the SDP/Liberal Alliance three decades ago. But the Alliance got around 7.5 million votes in 1983 and in 1987. That's well out of reach. Here's my guess for the 2015 election. UKIP will get around 2.5 million votes and fewer than five MPs (quite possibly none at all).

Yesterday's Papers: Gay marriages and the Daily Telegraph

The Queen's Speech this week omitted any mention of the proposed Bill to legalise gay marriages, presumably as a sop to those on the Tory right who regarded David Cameron's enthusiasm for the subject as 'the last straw'.

That quote comes from a piece by Fraser Nelson in the Daily Telegraph. Here's more from the same source:

'There was something wonderfully British about the passage of the Civil Partnership Act, which was approved one rainy Tuesday evening to no fanfare at all ... [A]lmost nobody cared. Civil partnerships were seen, quite rightly, as ironing out a legal crinkle: it seemed common sense to grant gay couples the same rights over issues such as inheritance and hospital visiting rights.'

Is there a slight rewriting of history going on? These are some headlines from stories published in the Daily Telegraph back when the Civil Partnership Bill was first proposed by the Labour government of Tony Blair:

'Williams denounces gay marriages' (27 May 2003)
'Legal rights for homosexuals denounced - by gays' (30 June 2003)
'Taxpayers face £240 million-a-year bill for gay contract' (1 July 2003)
'Gay unions denounced as charter for tax dodgers' (1 July 2003)
'Outrage greets National Trust's plan for homosexual "weddings"' (28 December 2003)

Not quite true, then, that 'almost nobody cared'. The Telegraph clearly did, and spent some time agonising in its leader columns on what the correct Tory attitude should be. This was an early sortie:

'Homosexuals clearly have some special grievances - over hospital-visiting rights and funeral arrangements, for example. But there are other ways of righting these wrongs, one by one, than by inventing a form of quasi-marriage ceremony that would be open to widespread abuse. The problem of inheritance rights, for instance, might be solved at a stroke by abolishing inheritance tax altogether.' (1 July 2003)

But then the Conservative Party, under the leadership of Michael Howard, decided that there would be a free vote on the issue, a major shift in its position, and the Telegraph followed suit:

'Allowing gay people to affirm their relationship within a civil contract does not undermine the institution of marriage. It might even reinforce it. We will all benefit from greater recognition of stable relationships, of whatever kind.' (25 November 2003)

So all's well that ended well. But it wasn't quite as smooth a passage as Fraser Nelson implies.